A Prescription for the Malaiseof Social ‘Science’IN THE EARLY 19TH CENTURY, the French visionary Auguste Comte proposed a scientific chain of being, ranging from the physical sciences at the bottom upthrough biology to the “queen” of sciences,sociologie, at the top. A science of human so-cial behavior, Comte contended, could helphumanity make moral and political decisionsand construct more efficient, just governments.Comte, who spent time in a sanitarium formental illness, had admirers—notably JohnStuart Mill—but he was viewed by many con-temporary thinkers as a crank. He died in 1857without ever landing a full-time universitypost—or indeed any steady employment.

EYE ON SCIENCE

By JOHN HORGAN

ILOVE TELLING OTHERS what’s wrong with them, and the anthropology brou- haha gives me a great excuse to offer a diagnosis of, and prescription for, social
science’s malaise. Clearly, social science has a
split personality. On the one hand you have
social scientists—let’s call them “softies”—
who identify less with physicists and chemists
than with scholars in the humanities. Stevens
Institute of Technology, where I teach, is a
case in point: Social science and psychology
fall within the purview of the College of Arts
and Letters, which also encompasses philosophy, history, literature, music, and my own
humble discipline, journalism.

As far as I can tell, none of my social-science colleagues seethe with resentmentat being lumped together with the humani-ties folks, who are, after all, a fun bunch. Butother social scientists, “hardies,” are desper-ately trying to sidle up to the harder sciences.Softies and hardies have been fighting foras long as I can remember. In 1975, for ex-ample, the Harvard biologist E.O. Wilsoncontended in his blockbuster Sociobiology thatsocial science would only become truly sci-entific by embracing evolutionary theory andgenetics. Horrified softies denounced socio-biology as a throwback to social Darwinismand eugenics, two of the most noxious socialapplications of science.

GEOFFREY MOSS FOR THE CHRONICLE REVIEW

tems—people—are all different from each
other; each person who has ever lived is
unique in ways that are not trivial but essential to our humanity. Each individual
mind also keeps changing in response to new
experiences—reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra,
watching Apocalypse Now, banging your head
on the ice while playing pond hockey, eating
mushrooms in Central Park, kissing a co-worker at the office Christmas party, having a
baby, losing a job. Imagine how hard physics
would be if every electron were the unique
product of its entire history.

Societies also vary markedly across spaceand time. France in 2011 is radically differentthan it was in Comte’s era. The United Statestoday is quite different than it was a century,a decade, a year, or even a month ago. Justthink of how President Obama’s election,the Tea Party uprising, and the WikiLeaksrevelations have altered our society. Socialscientists are chasing a moving target, onethey can never catch. As the anthropologistClifford Geertz, the archetypal softy, wrote,social scientists can construct only “hindsightaccounts of the connectedness of things thatB4 THE CHRONICLE REVIEWFEBRUARY 18, 2011